BRITTEN / BERKELEY: Auden Songs Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) • Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) • Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) Settings of Poems by W.H. Auden Benjamin Britten’s post-war pre-eminence as an opera composer has tended to overshadow the considerable achievements of his earlier years. Between his official Opus 1, the Sinfonietta of 1932, written when he was nineteen, and the completion of Peter Grimes in 1945, he was fluently and prolifically writing works in every genre, many of which remain far too little known even today.

Among these are five major works involving texts written or devised by the poet W.H.Auden: the song cycles Our Hunting Fathers (1936) and On This Island (1937), the choral and orchestral Ballad of Heroes (1939), the operetta Paul Bunyan (completed in 1941), and the choral Hymn to St Cecilia (1942). In addition, Britten set a number of other poems by Auden during this period which remained unpublished during his lifetime and which are included on this disc. Britten and Auden first met in July 1935 when they were both working for the GPO Film Unit, an organization dedicated to the making of educational documentary films. Auden became one of the major influences on the young composer and while Britten confessed to being somewhat intimidated by Auden’s brilliant intellect, it was undoubtedly a partnership of mutual admiration and respect. Their first collaboration was for the film Coal Face in 1935, soon followed by Night Mail in the following year.

It was the success of the latter in particular that encouraged the two men to embark on projects of a more substantial nature and in 1936 Auden devised the text for one of Britten’s most important early works, described by the composer as his real Op.1, the orchestral song-cycle Our Hunting Fathers. It was soon after the première of that work at the 1936 Norfolk and Norwich Festival that Britten acquired a copy of a newly published volume of Auden’s poetry entitled Look, Stranger!, two poems from which, Underneath the abject willow and Night covers up the rigid land, were dedicated to him. He set the first of these in November 1936 as the second of his Two Ballads for two voices and piano. During May and October of the following year, he completed eight further settings, five of which were selected for the cycle On This Island, Op.11, for solo voice and piano, first performed in November 1937 at a BBC contemporary music concert by the soprano Sophie Wyss and the composer.

The score was published by Boosey & Hawkes in October 1938 and originally designated ‘Vol.1’: it seems likely that Britten intended to use the three remaining settings in a second volume which never materialised. On This Island was Britten’s first published group of songs with piano. The set is conceived more as a sequence of self-contained vignettes, perhaps reflecting the recent experience of writing the Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge, rather than attempting the quasi-symphonic unity of Our Hunting Fathers. They are also notably simpler in their relatively orthodox approach to word-setting and use of more traditional harmony. Perhaps the most striking song is the fourth, Nocturne, which with its daring reliance on the most economical of musical means sounds perhaps the most personal note in the work and anticipates the inspired simplicities found in such later cycles as Les Illuminations and the Michelangelo Sonnets. In January 1938, Britten completed another setting of a poem from Look, Stranger!, Fish in the unruffled lakes, which was subsequently published in 1947.

Two further settings, What’s in your mind and a new solo-voice version of Underneath the abject willow were written during the early 1940s, but remained in manuscript. These songs, along with the unused settings from 1937, were finally published by Boosey & Hawkes under the title Fish in the Unruffled Lakes: Six settings of W.H.Auden in 1997. Underneath the abject willow is particularly noteworthy as the text is dedicated to Britten and is clearly Auden’s invitation for his younger friend to break his natural reticence and abandon himself to the pleasures of the flesh. Yet Britten’s jaunty setting of this text is remarkably impersonal, as if the message is being deliberately misunderstood. The two versions Britten made differ primarily in their accompaniments, the later solo-voice version being simpler and more direct in effect, but the strangely detached impression remains the same in both. The Four Cabaret Songs, composed between 1937 and 1939 but not published until 1980, reveal another, more light-hearted side to the Britten-Auden creative partnership.

These songs were written for Hedli Anderson, a singer specialising in high quality ‘light music’ who had played the part of The Singer in The Ascent of F6, an Auden-Isherwood theatre piece for which Britten had written the incidental music in 1937. The Funeral Blues (also known as Stop all the clocks) was in fact originally written for this production when it was sung by a choir accompanied by two pianos and percussion, but later reworked in a version for solo voice and piano. Tell me the truth about love and Johnny are obviously influenced by the popular hits of the day (à la Cole Porter), while the onomatopoeic train noises of Calypso, the last to be composed, clearly point forward to Midnight on the Great Western from Britten’s Thomas Hardy cycle Winter Words of 1953. In much the same lighter vein is the very brief When you’re feeling like expressing your affection, probably written in 1935 for a GPO promotional film encouraging the use of public telephone boxes. Britten had met Lennox Berkeley during the mid-1930s and during this period, the two men were on close terms.

They shared Britten’s home at the Old Mill in Snape, Suffolk, for a time, collaborated on an orchestral suite on Catalan folk tunes, Mont Juic in 1937, and in 1938, Britten dedicated his recently composed Piano Concerto to Berkeley. It is probable that Berkeley came into contact with Auden’s poetry through Britten as his first Auden settings, Night covers up the rigid land and Lay your sleeping head, my love (both recorded here) date from this time. The latter was another poem that Auden had dedicated to Britten, but which Britten never set (Berkeley, following Auden’s lead, dedicated his setting ‘To B.B.’). Berkeley’s setting of Night covers up the rigid land is more pensive and static than Britten’s, capturing the mood of the poem and sustaining it throughout, rather than following the more developmental treatment preferred by his younger colleague. Berkeley returned to Auden for his Five Poems, Op. 53, composed in 1958. Interestingly, all except the first song, Lauds, which Auden wrote in 1952, had been previously set by Britten.

Carry her over the water features in the second act of Paul Bunyan, where it forms the wedding song for Slim and Tiny. Though it is unlikely that Berkeley would have known Britten’s setting (Paul Bunyan was withdrawn after its first run of performances in New York and not revived until 1974), the resemblances between the two settings, such as the compound-time rhythm and the threefold repetition on the word ‘agreeably’, are striking. In these beautiful songs, Berkeley reveals himself to be as sensitive as Britten in his response to a text, in his ability to mould words and music into a strongly unified and affecting listening experience. Benjamin Britten Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) When Benjamin Britten died on December 4, 1976 , apparently he was worried that he would be forgotten. It is clear that this fear was unwarranted: Britten’s compositions in all genres remain in the canon. In particular his operatic legacy is a lasting one. His works in this area have proven to be among the most enduring English-language operas in history, revived time and again worldwide.

A Talented Youth Edward Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk (in the United Kingdom), on November 22, 1913 . It is often noted that the composer came into the world on St. Cecilia’s Day, a holiday dedicated to the patron saint of music. His father Robert worked as a dentist, but his mother, Edith, was an active local singer and pianist who carefully guided Britten’s musical education. She recognized her son’s talent and interest in music early on, encouraging him to pursue ambitious career goals. Edith gave Britten his first music lessons, both in piano and notation, and as a small child he wrote down numerous, if brief, topical compositions relating to family events. Perhaps inspired by his mother’s voice, he also wrote songs. By the age of ten, he was a skilled pianist and composer, and that year he commenced viola lessons as well. His viola instructor introduced her young student to Frank Bridge, a noted English composer whose orchestral and chamber works are still widely performed today. When Britten began his studies with Bridge in London, he was fourteen years old and had already completed one hundred works.

Composition lessons with Bridge instilled in Britten a lifelong attention to compositional form and technique, and they also inspired Britten to adhere to his own personal style. Early works completed under Bridge’s supervision include Britten’s String Quartet in F, and an orchestrated song cycle, Quatre chansons françaises (both written in 1928 ). An unhappy two years at public school ( 1928 - 1930 ), away from home and at the mercy of an unsupportive school music teacher, did not deter Britten from his compositional path. He kept up his lessons with Bridge and produced works including Rhapsody for string quartet, as well as music for viola and his Hymn to the Virgin for double chorus ( 1930 ). Upon the completion of his public school education, Britten was accepted at the Royal College of Music on the merits of several works including the Hymn to the Virgin and a solo vocal work called The Birds ( 1929 , revised 1934 ). Entering college in 1930 , Britten studied with the distinguished composer John Ireland. Unfortunately, the teacher-student relationship was fraught with tension.

In spite of these difficulties, Britten’s talent flourished. He became acquainted in London with the music of a number of important twentieth-century composers, and added Igor Stravinsky, Gustav Mahler, and Dmitry Shostakovich to his list of influences, which already included the music of Beethoven, Brahms, and the Second Viennese School . He also expressed admiration for his compatriot William Walton and the Australian-born Percy Grainger. His own output under Ireland focused on vocal music, but he earned a chamber music award in 1932 for his string quintet, the Phantasy in F minor. 1932 also saw the completion of his Op.1, the Sinfonietta, which he conducted himself in a professional performance. That same year Oxford University Press printed his first publication, a group of three part-songs. On his graduation the following winter he received a travel grant, which he planned to use in order to study with Alban Berg in Vienna. However, Britten’s parents dissuaded him, believing that contact with Berg and his unconventional style might be detrimental to their son.

Employment and New Independence Though he remained at home after graduation ( 1933 ), his momentum did not falter. A set of choral variations, entitled A Boy was Born, was written for and premiered by the BBC singers, and in 1934 he attended a performance of his Phantasy oboe quartet in Florence. This concert, for the International Society for Contemporary Music, brought his work to the attention of publishers and performance groups, both in Britain and abroad. Upon his return from Italy he was informed of his father’s death, which resulted from cancer. Though enough money was left to the family to support Britten, he preferred to earn his living as a composer. In 1935 he was hired at the General Post Office Film Unit (GPO) in London, under pioneering filmmaker John Grierson . At the GPO, Grierson put Britten in charge of writing music for new documentaries, such as Night Mail, a 1936 film about the Royal Mail train delivery service. The task imposed short deadlines on the composer, and the music had to closely match the filmed subject; thus, Britten was forced to sharpen his compositional skills and his sense of dramatic writing.

Soon after Britten assumed this position, the poet W.H. Auden also joined Grierson’s team (he wrote the narration for Night Mail), and Britten quickly became a member of Auden’s circle of young luminaries in the arts. During the next few years, the composer provided incidental music for his friends’ stage works, and film music at the GPO, as well as some music for the BBC. In 1936 he also completed the Temporal Variations for oboe and piano, and set several of Auden’s poems in On this Island (originally eight songs, but only five were published). Britten found himself drawn to the left-leaning politics of his newfound friends and colleagues. One collaboration with Auden, Our Hunting Fathers (1936), is a vocal-orchestral work condemning both human cruelty toward animals and the pre-war political situation in Europe. In the next few years, he also wrote music associated with his friends’ experimental theater group, with those fighting fascism in Spain, and with Randall Swingler, the editor of the Left Review. During this period Britten was able to come to terms with his homosexuality.

Many of his friends, including Auden and author Christopher Isherwood openly acknowledged that they were gay, and Britten’s association with them helped him to feel more comfortable with his sexual identity, despite the fact that homosexuality was neither lawful nor publicly tolerated in England at the time. His mother’s death in 1937 , while devastating to Britten, also in some ways freed him to at last pursue romantic relationships. A few months later, he met a tenor named Peter Pears. They were close friends at first, and soon shared a flat, but eventually became lifelong partners as well. American Overture The two embarked on a voyage to North America in 1939. With the European situation worsening, Auden and Isherwood had already moved to New York, and Britten desired a change himself. After a short stay in Canada and a trip to Michigan, Britten and Pears settled at Woodstock in New York, near their friend Aaron Copland . There Britten worked on a violin concerto (1939), and the song cycle Les Illuminations, on texts by the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud.

His works performed in the U.S., the piano concerto (from 1938) and the violin concerto, were successful with audiences, and Britten received several new commissions—one, interestingly, from the Japanese government in 1940 (before Japan’s direct involvement in World War II) for the 2600th anniversary of their governing dynasty. This was the Sinfonia da Requiem, with which Britten intended to express his sentiments on war and to memorialize his parents. Finding the work to be somewhat unsuitable for the celebrations, the Japanese government politely honored the fee but did not perform the work. The composition did, however, receive performances in New York, Boston, and Chicago. As England entered World War II, those abroad were advised to remain where they were. While remaining in America Britten suffered an extended illness in 1940 , but still managed to compose fairly continuously. His output that year included the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, written for Pears’ voice, the Diversions for left-handed pianist Paul Wittgenstein, music for radio (in collaboration with Auden), and several short pieces for piano (Op.23).

At the end of the year, Britten and Pears relocated to Brooklyn Heights to be near Auden and his then-partner, Chester Kallman, an American poet. In New York Britten turned to writing for younger musicians at the urging of his publishers, Boosey and Hawkes. The firm maintained a New York office and a representative there suggested that the composer turn to music that might be easily marketed among American high school music programs. The result was the 1941 operetta Paul Bunyan, a very American subject, with a text by Auden. It was not received particularly well, but has been revived occasionally since its premiere. A summer in California yielded Britten’s First String Quartet, and a commission from the Cleveland Orchestra produced what was later known as An American Overture. New Success in England Britten and Pears returned to England in the spring of 1942. As conscientious objectors, at home they both faced tribunals and the potential assignment of non-combatant duties. However, in the end they were released from such obligations and were left free to continue along their career paths.

On the voyage back to England, Britten had completed the choral work titled Hymn to Saint Cecilia, on texts by Auden, as well as A Ceremony of Carols. The Hymn was performed on Britten’s birthday (St. Cecilia’s Day), 1942, by the BBC Singers, and the Ceremony of Carols debuted in December with the Fleet Street Choir at Norwich Castle. In the fall, Britten and Pears premiered the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo to great critical and public acclaim. Decca also immediately snapped up the pieces, which led to a successful recording. While in the United States, Britten had begun making plans for the composition of an opera . He was initially encouraged in this undertaking by Serge. The famous conductor had conducted the Boston premiere of the Symphonia da Requiem and was so impressed by its dramatic content that he suggested Britten write operas. When Britten answered that the work he did for a living did not allow him the time, Koussevitzky further encouraged the idea with a $1000 commission for a stage work and the offer to perform it at the Tanglewood Festival.

In fact, only a few months before, Britten himself had already reached the conclusion he wanted to write operas. He had read an article written by the English novelist E.M. Forster about the Suffolk poet George Crabbe, and had begun to consider the 1810 poem “The Borough” as prospective material for a libretto. Montagu Slater, Britten’s friend from his early days in the General Post Office Film Unit, realized the libretto and this project eventually became the opera Peter Grimes. Pears was employed as the leading tenor at the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company in London, and the new opera was set for production there. The work was stalled due to the librettist’s inexperience with writing opera , his ill health, and Britten’s own illness in England in the spring of 1943. Britten was able to finish several other works, however, including the Serenade for tenor , horn, and strings, a Prelude and Fugue for strings, and the choral work Rejoice in the Lamb. The years after Britten’s return to England (1942) were preoccupied with the rather slow organization and composition of the Peter Grimes project.

The opera opened at last on June 7, 1945, and was instantly hailed as the first significant English opera since those of Henry Purcell in the seventeenth century. In the next few years it was performed throughout Europe and in the United States, and was broadcast by the BBC. The opera was groundbreaking in numerous ways: it was a masterful vernacular composition; it proved that an audience existed for new operas; and it dealt directly with issues of homosexuality and social prejudice. This was the first in a long line of Britten’s operas to address the situation of the social outsider and to pay particular attention to perceptions of sexuality and sexual orientation. The public criminalization and pathologization of homosexuality became a recurring theme in the composer’s operatic works, from Peter Grimes through Death in Venice. Shortly after this success, he wrote a new song cycle for Pears, The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, as well as the Second String Quartet, and worked on the film The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

Pears, along with Eric Crozier, the Sadler’s Wells director and producer, had resigned over the politics of staging new works in a traditional medium, and they established their own company to further their progressive goals. The Rape of Lucretia ( 1946 ) was written for the new group, which was stationed at the Glyndebourne Festival. When Lucretia was received unfavorably, Glyndebourne did not want to finance another such project, so Britten and Crozier organized their own company. The new English Opera Group settled at Aldeburgh and opened for business with Britten’s and Crozier’s 1947 comic opera , Albert Herring. For this group Britten also provided a new edition of the eighteenth-century ballad opera A Beggar’s Opera ( 1948 ), and the children’s works Let’s Make an Opera and The Little Sweep (both in 1949 ). Aldeburgh proved to be a perfect location for a new music festival as well; this festival opened in 1948 and attracted numerous high-profile figures. The Arts Council for the 1951 Festival of Britain commissioned the next opera project.

Billy Budd (1951, revised 1960 ), an interpretation of the Melville work of the same title, was composed using a libretto by the celebrated novelist E.M. Forster. The opera is unusual in that it is set on a naval ship, and thus utilizes no female characters or female voices, and in that it uses Forster’s prose text rather than verse. The following year, 1952, another opera was composed. Following the death of King George VI was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and Britten wrote his opera Gloriana to honor the occasion. The writing of such a work by a composer not associated with the court was unprecedented in English history. And, although Gloriana had the support of the audience, it was much criticized in the press, for reasons varying from the treatment of the subject (the private affairs of the court of Elizabeth I) to the cost of its production; it seemed that some resentment was also felt against what was considered Britten’s preferential treatment.

While preparations began for Gloriana, Britten was already working on The Turn of the Screw, with a libretto adapted from Henry James by Myfanwy Piper, the wife of the English Opera Group’s designer. Just as Peter Grimes had done, this opera thoughtfully addressed social topics such as social oppression, innocence, and implications of pedophilia, to a highly successful dramatic and musical effect. Rehearsed at Aldeburgh and premiered in Venice in 1954 , the production made its way back to London, went on a national tour, and then traveled to Holland. In this larger international context, reviews were generally favorable, and it is to this day one of the most frequently performed of Britten’s operas. Travels Before beginning work on his next major work, the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas, Britten set out with Pears on a journey through Asia for three months in 1955. Their stop in Indonesia proved to be particularly important, as Britten was able to hear firsthand the music of Javanese and Balinese gamelan ensembles.

He had been introduced to Balinese gamelan music while in the United States, through his friendship with composer and ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee. Many of Britten’s works had previously shown McPhee’s influence, but The Prince of the Pagodas is the most representative example. A visit to Japan also became important in its influence on the later opera Curlew River ( 1963 ). In 1958 came Noye’s Fludde, a biblical opera meant for television broadcast, but premiered instead at the Aldeburgh Festival. It was written with audience participation in mind, with children taking part onstage and in the orchestra, and the young in the audience enlisted to sing hymns . A Midsummer Night’s Dream followed in 1960 , with innovative orchestration , and a text taken directly from Shakespeare. In 1961 Britten was asked to write a work to celebrate the rebuilding of the Coventry Cathedral. The new cathedral was built on the ruins of the old one, which had been bombed during the Second World War. Britten’s response, The War Requiem, was his largest work, involving chorus, soloists and two separate instrumental ensembles, with a conductor for each.

The Latin in this work was supplemented by the poetry of Wilfred Owen , which imbued the work with a strong pacifist statement. It was premiered in May 1962 , with Pears, the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya and the celebrated baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as soloists. Britten also wrote three church parables in the 1960s: The Burning Fiery Furnace, The Golden Vanity, and The Prodigal Son. In 1968 , returning from a trip to Venice, he became ill with an infection of the heart, and narrowly escaped death. Last Works Though Noye’s Fludde was never broadcast on television, a later work by Britten, Owen Wingrave, was a more successful foray into television opera . Britten turned again to Myfanwy Piper for the libretto, based on another ghost story by Henry James. Broadcast in 1971 in both Europe and America, Owen Wingrave tells the story of a late-nineteenth-century pacifist rejected by his family—it is significant that this was written as worldwide tensions rose regarding the Vietnam War and the Russian presence in Czechoslovakia.

Britten again collaborated with Piper for the opera Death in Venice, adapted from Thomas Mann’s novella. It is a work of complex psychological, sexual, and metaphysical exploration, and Britten identified deeply with the story. The 1976 Aldeburgh Festival included a revised version of Paul Bunyan and a performance of the vocal cantata Phaedra, which he had written for mezzo-soprano Janet Baker. During the festival, it was announced that the Queen had bestowed upon Britten the honor of a life peerage. His last work, a Welcome Ode for children to perform during a local visit from the Queen, had to be written with the help of composer Colin Matthews due to Britten’s ill health. Just after the premiere of Death in Venice three years earlier, Britten had been hospitalized for surgery to replace a heart valve, and his health had steadily declined. He was able to celebrate his sixty-third birthday, but by then was seriously ill. He died on December 4, 1976 . References: Brett, Philip, Jennifer Doctor, Judith LeGrove, and Paul Banks: ‘Britten, (Edward) Benjamin’, Grove Music Online ed. L.

Macy (Accessed 6 October 2005 ), < Oliver, Michael. Benjamin Britten. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996 . White, Eric Walter. Benjamin Britten: His Life and Operas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970 . Pikle - The Diary Junction - Benjamin Britten Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten (1923-1939) Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten (1939-1945) Journeying Boy May 2005, September 2008, March 2013 Please email if you have any corrections, additions or comments, or if you've found the site useful. Thank you.

IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS: 1) The first line of basic information may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown, or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British' a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies. 4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges, and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising. I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some variety between them.

5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries. DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS Benjamin Britten | gramophone.co.uk Benjamin Britten Born: 1913 Died: 1976 Britten came of age in 1934, the year in which Elgar, Holst and Delius died. He rapidly dragged British music into another era – his own. Explore Britten's life and music... In 1939, Britten fled to the US where, for a time, he house-shared with fellow musicians, writers and a burlesque dancer, as Philip Clark reveals... Read more Full Biography England’s most significant composer in the second half of the 20th century was born on St Cecilia’s Day (November 22).

The patron saint of music blessed Britten with precocious gifts for he began playing the piano at two and was reading symphony and opera scores in bed at the age of seven. By his 10th birthday he had completed an oratorio and a string quartet; by 16 he had produced a symphony, six quartets, 10 piano sonatas and other smaller works. Some of the material from these juvenile works was later incorporated into one of his first mature works, the Simple Symphony (1934). Britten was the son of a dental surgeon and a mother who was a fair amateur pianist. He had a good education, adding the viola to his sporting and musical accomplishments at school before studying with the major influence on his musical development, Frank Bridge. Later, at the Royal College of Music, John Ireland was his composition teacher; Arthur Benjamin (of Jamaica Rumba fame) taught him piano. Britten’s unique voice was quick in arriving and soon after completing his studies he was commissioned to write the music for a number of innovative documentary films, most notably Night Mail for the GPO film unit. In this he collaborated with the second figure who was to influence his thinking, the poet WH Auden.

Not only did Auden provide the text for Britten’s first song-cycle (On this Island) and reveal to him the beauties of poetry and awareness of the possibilities of setting words and music, but he enforced Britten’s pacifist convictions. When Auden departed for America in 1939, Britten and his friend, tenor Peter Pears, followed him a few months later feeling, in his own words, ‘muddled, fed-up and looking for work, longing to be used’. Before this, the first performances of the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge had taken place at the Salzburg Festival (1937) and in London. Aaron Copland reviewed it: ‘The piece is what we would call a knock-out.’ Not yet 30, Britten was firmly on his way. While in America he produced his first big orchestral work (Sinfonia da Requiem, 1940) and his first dramatic work, the operetta Paul Bunyan, which was – as Britten put it – ‘politely spat at’. In 1942, with the war going badly for Britain and feeling homesick, he decided to return home.

He appeared before the Tribunal of Conscientious Objectors and was exempted from military duty, prepared to do what he could for the war effort without sacrificing his pacifist ideals. He was allowed to continue composing as long as he took part in concerts promoted by CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts). Britten, apart from being a fine and exacting conductor of his own works, was always an excellent pianist (he was the soloist in the premiere of his Piano Concerto in 1939). His Mozart-playing was exquisite but as an accompanist in recital or as a chamber musician he was up there among the best. Before the end of the war he had produced two of his most enduring works, the Ceremony of Carols and the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, but it was his opera Peter Grimes that made him internationally famous. This was the result of a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation in America. The resumption of artistic activity after the conflict and the reopening of the Sadler’s Wells theatre made this a keenly anticipated event and produced one of the most memorable first nights in British music. Peter Grimes was hailed as milestone in modern opera.

With only two opera companies established in Britain, Britten founded the English Opera Group. Then in 1948 he, with Eric Crozier and Peter Pears, founded the Aldeburgh Festival, then, as now, an indispensable national flagship of musical excellence. He and Pears had made their base in the Suffolk village and it was remain their home for the rest of their lives together. A string of operas followed Peter Grimes, some with the expected full orchestra, some scored for a mere 12 instruments, facilitating performances and showing the composer to be a master of inventiveness with limited forces. The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Albert Herring, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Death in Venice (1973) have all, to a lesser or greater degree, established themselves in the repertoires of opera houses the world over. Britten was particularly adept at writing music for children, accessible without being condescending, and works like Let’s Make an Opera, Noye’s Fludde and The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra have had a stimulating, not to say inspirational, effect on generations of young people.

In 1961 he received a commission to celebrate the consecration of the newly built Coventry Cathedral to replace the building bombed in the war. The result was his powerful and profound War Requiem, using the words of the Latin Mass and the poems of the First World War poet Wilfred Owen. In 1967 the tiny Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh was replaced by the conversion of part of The Maltings at Snape into a larger concert and opera hall. Two years later it was destroyed by fire. The phoenix which rose from the ashes has proved to be among the outstanding concert halls of Europe and it was here that the first performance of Britten’s last major composition, Death in Venice, was given in 1973. As with so much of his work, his partner Peter Pears was the inspiration behind it, as much a confessional piece as an autobiographical one. Whether or not you are a fan of Pears’s voice, no one can deny the enormous influence exerted by Pears on Britten during the course of their nearly four decades together. Few other composers’ partners, straight or gay, can claim to have dominated a composer’s creative life to the same extent.

During work on Death in Venice, it became clear to Britten that the heart condition from which he had suffered was likely to be fatal and in the last few years of his life he was reduced to doing very little. He had been made a Companion of Honour as early as 1952 and awarded the most coveted British award, the Order of Merit, in 1965; less than six months before his death he was elevated to the peerage, the first composer ever to be made a Lord. Britten wrote in a stunning variety of styles without ever losing the unmistakable ‘Britten sound’. More memorable than the melodies he wrote are the haunting moods and atmospheres he conjures up. The brooding, bleak flatness of the East Anglian landscape forever hovers round him. His friendship with some of the greatest artists of the day (including, most notably, horn player Dennis Brain, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist Sviatoslav Richter) encouraged music which delights in virtuosity. The sea, too, played a major part in his creative process.

‘My parents’ house directly faced the sea,’ he wrote, ‘and my childhood was coloured by the fierce storms that sometimes drove ships into our coast and ate away whole stretches of the neighbouring cliffs.’ Britten came of age in 1934, the year in which Elgar, Holst and Delius died. He rapidly dragged British music into another era – his own. Benjamin Britten Biography Benjamin Britten Biography Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten (November 22, 1913 - December 4, 1976) was a British composer and pianist. He is generally considered to be the greatest British composer since World War II, and some say the greatest since Henry Purcell. He was born in Lowestoft in Suffolk, lived in the USA from c.1939 to 1942 and died in Aldeburgh. Some of his works were based on British folk songs, and they, like many of his operatic roles, were intended to be sung by his partner, the tenor Peter Pears. Britten founded the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 and became a life peer in 1976.

One of Britten's best known works is the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), which was composed to accompany Instruments of the Orchestra, an educational film produced by the British government. It has the subtitle Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, and takes a melody from Henry Purcell's Abdelazar as its central theme. Britten gives individual variations to each of the instruments in the orchestra, starting with the woodwind, then the string instruments, the brass instruments and finally the percussion. Britten then brings the whole orchestra together again in a fugue before restating the theme to close the work. In the original film there was a spoken commentary, but this is often omitted in concert performances and recordings. Britten was also an accomplished pianist, and sometimes performed at the piano in chamber music or accompanying lieder. However, apart from the Piano Concerto (1938) and the Diversions for piano and orchestra (written for Paul Wittgenstein in 1940), he wrote very little music for the instrument, and in a 1963 interview for the BBC said that he thought of it as "a background instrument".

Commentary Even today, twenty-seven years after his death, it may be too early to achieve an objective assessment of the quality of Britten's works. This is because of the intense partisanship which surrounded it during his lifetime. When Britten's early works began to appear, musical criticism in England was deeply reactionary. As the first British composer to turn his back on traditional 'englishisms' and embrace a continental culture fully, Britten met considerable hostility from those who found his music slick and 'clever' in a derogatory sense. There was also a good deal of envy and resentment at the fortunate support and publicity his music quickly attracted from publishers and record companies. Perhaps the truth will be seen to lie somewhere in the middle. The present contributor considers Britten an uneven composer who possessed a unique and strong musical identity and personality, and who produced some works of enduring quality, such as Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and Death in Venice, but who also, it must be admitted, had several fallow periods where he seemed to repeat a few well-worn devices.

It must be remembered that Britten worked very quickly, often against punishing deadlines, and the techniques he evolved in writing illustrative music for the cinema in the 1930s served him for the rest of his life, not always with the most satisfying results. Works Music for the famous GPO documentary film Night Mail (1936) with words by W. H. Auden Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) Ceremony of Carols (USA, 1942) Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (USA, 1943) Peter Grimes (USA, 1945), an opera based on a poem about a Suffolk fisherman, George Crabbe's The Borough The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946) The Rape of Lucretia (1946) Albert Herring (1947), after Guy de Maupassant's story "Le Rosier de Mme.

Husson" Billy Budd (1951), after Herman Melville's novella) Gloriana (1953) for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom The Turn of the Screw (1954), an opera based on the story by Henry James Noye's Fludde (1958) Fanfare for St Edmundsbury (1959) short antiphonal and polytonal piece for three trumpets A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), after Shakespeare War Requiem (1961) - a major bestseller, regarded as his masterpiece, although its great emotional intensity was too much for some critics.

Curlew River (1964) The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) The Prodigal Son (1968) Death in Venice (1973) based on Thomas Mann's novella Benjamin Britten: Biography | gramophone.co.uk Home » features » Benjamin Britten: Biography Benjamin Britten on Aldeburgh Beach in 1959 (photo: Hans Wild courtesy of Born: November 22, 1913, Lowestoft, England Died: December 4, 1976, Aldeburgh, England England’s most significant composer in the second half of the 20th century was born on St Cecilia’s Day. The patron saint of music blessed Britten with precocious gifts for he began playing the piano at two and was reading symphony and opera scores in bed at the age of seven. By his 10th birthday he had completed an oratorio and a string quartet; by 16 he had produced a symphony, six quartets, 10 piano sonatas and other smaller works. Some of the material from these juvenile works was later incorporated into one of his first mature works, the Simple Symphony (1934).

Britten was the son of a dental surgeon and a mother who was a fair amateur pianist. He had a good education, adding the viola to his sporting and musical accomplishments at school before studying with the major influence on his musical development, Frank Bridge. Later, at the Royal College of Music, John Ireland was his composition teacher; Arthur Benjamin (of Jamaica Rumba fame) taught him piano. Britten’s unique voice was quick in arriving and soon after completing his studies he was commissioned to write the music for a number of innovative documentary films, most notably Night Mail for the GPO film unit. In this he collaborated with the second figure who was to influence his thinking, the poet WH Auden. Not only did Auden provide the text for Britten’s first song-cycle (On this Island) and reveal to him the beauties of poetry and awareness of the possibilities of setting words and music, but he enforced Britten’s pacifist convictions. When Auden departed for America in 1939, Britten and his friend, tenor Peter Pears, followed him a few months later feeling, in his own words, ‘muddled, fed-up and looking for work, longing to be used’.

Before this, the first performances of the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge had taken place at the Salzburg Festival (1937) and in London. Aaron Copland reviewed it: ‘The piece is what we would call a knock-out.’ Not yet 30, Britten was firmly on his way. While in America he produced his first big orchestral work ( Sinfonia da Requiem , 1940) and his first dramatic work, the operetta Paul Bunyan, which was – as Britten put it – ‘politely spat at’. In 1942, with the war going badly for Britain and feeling homesick, he decided to return home. He appeared before the Tribunal of Conscientious Objectors and was exempted from military duty, prepared to do what he could for the war effort without sacrificing his pacifist ideals. He was allowed to continue composing as long as he took part in concerts promoted by CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts).

Britten, apart from being a fine and exacting conductor of his own works, was always an excellent pianist (he was the soloist in the premiere of his Piano Concerto in 1939). His Mozart -playing was exquisite but as an accompanist in recital or as a chamber musician he was up there among the best. Before the end of the war he had produced two of his most enduring works, the Ceremony of Carols and the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, but it was his opera Peter Grimes that made him internationally famous. This was the result of a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation in America. The resumption of artistic activity after the conflict and the reopening of the Sadler’s Wells theatre made this a keenly anticipated event and produced one of the most memorable first nights in British music. Peter Grimes was hailed as milestone in modern opera. With only two opera companies established in Britain, Britten founded the English Opera Group. Then in 1948 he, with Eric Crozier and Peter Pears, founded the Aldeburgh Festival, then, as now, an indispensable national flagship of musical excellence.

He and Pears had made their base in the Suffolk village and it was remain their home for the rest of their lives together. A string of operas followed Peter Grimes, some with the expected full orchestra, some scored for a mere 12 instruments, facilitating performances and showing the composer to be a master of inventiveness with limited forces. The Rape of Lucretia (1946), Albert Herring , Billy Budd , The Turn of the Screw , A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Death in Venice (1973) have all, to a lesser or greater degree, established themselves in the repertoires of opera houses the world over. Britten was particularly adept at writing music for children, accessible without being condescending, and works like Let’s Make an Opera, Noye’s Fludde and The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra have had a stimulating, not to say inspirational, effect on generations of young people. In 1961 he received a commission to celebrate the consecration of the newly built Coventry Cathedral to replace the building bombed in the war.

The result was his powerful and profound War Requiem , using the words of the Latin Mass and the poems of the First World War poet Wilfred Owen. In 1967 the tiny Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh was replaced by the conversion of part of the Maltings at Snape into a larger concert and opera hall. Two years later it was destroyed by fire. The phoenix which rose from the ashes has proved to be among the outstanding concert halls of Europe and it was here that the first performance of Britten’s last major composition, Death in Venice, was given in 1973. As with so much of his work, his partner Peter Pears was the inspiration behind it, as much a confessional piece as an autobiographical one. Whether or not you are a fan of Pears’s voice, no one can deny the enormous influence exerted by Pears on Britten during the course of their nearly four decades together. Few other composers’ partners, straight or gay, can claim to have dominated a composer’s creative life to the same extent.

During work on Death in Venice, it became clear to Britten that the heart condition from which he had suffered was likely to be fatal and in the last few years of his life he was reduced to doing very little. He had been made a Companion of Honour as early as 1952 and awarded the most coveted British award, the Order of Merit, in 1965; less than six months before his death he was elevated to the peerage, the first composer ever to be made a Lord. Britten wrote in a stunning variety of styles without ever losing the unmistakable ‘Britten sound’. More memorable than the melodies he wrote are the haunting moods and atmospheres he conjures up. The brooding, bleak flatness of the East Anglian landscape forever hovers round him. His friendship with some of the greatest artists of the day (including, most notably, horn player Dennis Brain , cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist Sviatoslav Richter ) encouraged music which delights in virtuosity. The sea, too, played a major part in his creative process.

‘My parents’ house directly faced the sea,’ he wrote, ‘and my childhood was coloured by the fierce storms that sometimes drove ships into our coast and ate away whole stretches of the neighbouring cliffs.’ Britten came of age in 1934, the year in which Elgar, Holst and Delius died. He rapidly dragged British music into another era – his own.

Question: Which composer (1913 to 1976) wrote the music used in the 1936 GPO film 'Night Mail'?
Answer: BENJAMIN BRITTEN